Skin

  Caffery’s eyes went back to the window. What had been out there? It hadn’t been much more than a smear of light, but somehow he’d had the impression of eyes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t glance back. ‘Whatever.’

  He came away from the window and limped for the door, holding a hand out to the district officer. ‘Thanks for your help, mate. I’m done now. Get the CSI guys to bag everything up, and when they’re finished, close up, will you?’

  His leg hurt more than he liked but he went fast down the stairs, out of a side door into the night, which was cool and muffled, a scent of something like lemon in the air. The back of the house was silent and dark. The lawn was terraced for about a hundred yards: he could see bird-feeders standing skeletal and ghostly in the gloom. Beyond that the road and the hills and the rapeseed field he’d driven past the other night when he’d been looking for the Walking Man.

  He stopped at the trees and spoke in a low, clear voice. ‘Are you there? Is that you?’

  He could hear his heart thudding. Nothing else.

  ‘If you’re there, you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to say anything. I won’t give you away.’

  He held his breath and listened, but all that came back was a cold, soundless breeze. In his mouth he tasted metal. He thought of the way the breeze had come across the fields, thought of the scents and sounds it must carry. He glanced at the house, at the windows. No one was listening. No CSI guys having a fag on the country lane. He took a few steps into the trees and crouched, his leg sending blue pulses of pain. He put his fingertips on the cold ground and held himself there, staring into the trees.

  ‘I know what you’ve done.’ He hesitated, not sure how to continue. This was nuts, talking to trees and thin air. ‘You’ve got away with it. But listen.’ His voice got softer. ‘I can’t help you any more. From here you’re on your own. That’s just the way it is.’

  He stopped and waited for something to come back. Long minutes passed until his leg ached so much he had to straighten. He put his hands into his pockets and listened again. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting: a movement or a breath. A rustle of leaves or cool clear words, spoken in the darkness.

  Nothing came. Nothing. Just the sound of the blood pounding in his head.

  68

  I’m not going to say anything. I won’t give you away . . .

  Half frozen in the trees, crouched behind the cylinder of the thermal lance she’d dragged up from the car, Flea stared at Caffery in disbelief.

  You’ve got away with it. But I can’t help you any more.

  She didn’t move. Just squatted there with her mouth half open, his words freezing her to the spot. What the hell was he talking about? What the hell did he know?

  From here you’re on your own. That’s just the way it is . . .

  Something hollow opened inside her. She felt colder and lonelier and more scared than she ever had in her life. She remembered what Mum had said in the quarry. Look after yourself. It hadn’t been a bland imprecation, a throwaway line telling her to be careful. It had been something starker than that. It had meant: you’re on your own, so put yourself first. In front of others. Now she saw clearly what she had to do: saw that the only important thing left was to protect herself. She had to fight for her life.

  Caffery stayed there for a long time and gradually, watching his face, the moonlight glancing off his eyes, it dawned on her that maybe he couldn’t see her. She raised a hand in front of her face, moved it back and forward. He didn’t react. Tongue between her teeth she leant forward a little, scrutinizing his eyes. He wasn’t focused on her. She stayed there, weight resting on her knuckles, head lifted, trying to work out what the hell was going on.

  When he sighed and straightened, she was sure of it: he didn’t know she was there. The words hadn’t been meant for her at all: whoever he thought he was talking to it wasn’t her, and if the words had meant something it had been a coincidence. But that didn’t change her resolve. As he turned and walked to the front gate, as she let all her breath out and sank back on her haunches, she was resolute, focused and completely calm. At midnight tonight Mandy and Thom were going to get the surprise of their lives. They were going to get the photo, and they were going to get something more, much more. They were going to get Misty’s body. On their front lawn, if necessary. Flea wasn’t going to listen to any arguments or reasoning: from here on it was their mess to clear up.

  By ten the CSI team had gone and the house was empty, just a copper on the gate, his back to her, waiting for the maintenance crew to arrive. After ten minutes he got bored of waiting, as she had known he would, and went to sit in his car, from which he could see the front of the cottage, not thinking there was someone round the back, sitting silently in the trees. Neither did he know that Caffery had left the back door open.

  So cold her bones were aching, she straightened, the muscles in her legs stiff, gathered up the thermal lance and went painfully across the lawn to the house, then inched her way through the back door. The copper might be lazy but he’d notice light seeping out of the windows, so inside she fumbled the Maglite from her jacket pocket, pointed it at her feet and crept along the hallway in the half-darkness, her ankles brushing against cats as she went. The house was smeared with fingerprint dust from the CSI team, strange pocked light filtering from the broken window, sending shadows across the walls. At the foot of the stairs she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, dressed in the pale blue shirt and jeans she’d thrown on a million hours ago, the cylinder of the lance hiked up on her back, her eyes watering. Her face seemed strangely smooth and young, as if stress had airbrushed it.

  The backpack was heavy and the tendons in her knees still hurt from jumping out of the kitchen window so she went slowly up the stairs, careful not to rub against the walls. She wasn’t thinking about fate or twists of destiny. She wasn’t thinking about what Caffery had been doing up here in the bedroom when her movements in the trees had distracted him. She was only thinking that she was cold. And there were less than two hours left to get the photograph over to Thom’s. Which was when everything would begin to change.

  Then she shone the torch along the wall to the bed, up to the safe, and found it not closed, but open. Open and completely empty. Yawning, wide and cold. And saw that things might well change in the next two hours. But not in the way she’d expected.

  69

  Ten minutes to midnight. Ten minutes to go. Flea slammed on the brakes and came to a halt in the dark street. She switched off the engine and eyed Mandy and Thom’s house. It was dark. The curtains were closed. Just the porch light on.

  She went fast up the path and banged on the door. Mandy was in her nightdress when she answered. Her naked calves were white and veined, her eyes puffy without makeup. Her hair stuck out in all directions. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded against her chest, shivering in the cold night, squinting at Flea.

  ‘I’ve got her in the car, Mandy. She’s in the boot.’

  ‘Who’s in the car? Who’ve you got?’

  ‘You can relax. No recording equipment.’

  Mandy gave her a puzzled look. ‘What equipment?’

  Flea sighed, went back to the car and opened the boot. The body was covered with a blanket, a few flattened cardboard boxes crammed around it. Already water was soaking into the cardboard. She raised her eyes to Mandy. ‘Have a look.’

  Mandy came a few paces down the path in her bare feet and stared at the shape in the boot. In the orangy sodium street-light her expression was blank. Almost a minute passed. Then something vital in her face – something structural – seemed to slip. She glanced up at the neighbours’ windows. Swallowed. ‘Close it, please.’

  Flea slammed the boot and came back to the gate. She took a breath and looked up at the sky. Clouds again. Always clouds. ‘I’ve come to tell you you’ve got what you wanted. You’ve won.’

  ‘Won what?’

  ‘I’m going to
take care of the problem.’

  There was a pause. Mandy glanced out at the street to make sure no one was there, then looked back at Flea. ‘Good. That’s good.’

  ‘Is Thom there?’

  ‘He’s asleep. It’s been hard on him. I don’t want to wake him up.’

  Flea stared at Mandy. ‘Tell me something.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘The truth, please. The truth. It’s all I’m going to ask of you, and then I’ll be gone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thom. Did he put you up to this? Or was it your idea?’

  Mandy’s eyes glittered. She shot the car boot a glance. She was shivering now.

  ‘Well? Was it your idea or his?’

  ‘For everyone’s sake.’ Her voice was quiet. Almost inaudible. ‘It’s better you never know the answer to that question.’

  And she went back up the path and closed the door, leaving Flea in the empty street, lonely and cold under the lamppost.

  70

  The countryside was deserted. The clouds had wrapped themselves across the fields, trapping everything, every leaf and branch, in an eerie, chalky light. Flea drove slowly, determinedly, taking the Focus down the small routes, the places she knew weren’t going to be monitored by the traffic guys at this time of night. Just a handful of other cars were out. She wondered what she’d look like to the oncoming drivers. Her face set and hard in their headlights. Gripping the wheel, eyes boring through the windscreen. Half possessed.

  She pulled off the road. The Focus bumped along the rutted drive to quarry number eight. In the boot the body shifted against the cardboard. She found a weak place in the surrounding bushes, swung the steering-wheel, gunned the engine, and forced the car deep into the undergrowth. It came to a halt, the axle hard against a fallen tree-trunk. She got out, crunched her way back to the quarry edge. Stood on the deserted track, listening hard, peering back along the route she’d come. She hadn’t been followed. Elf’s Grotto was so remote, so isolated, no one ever came up here. Still, she watched the road for almost five minutes until she was satisfied.

  About fifteen years ago, when she and Thom were still kids, a woman had gone missing from a nightclub in Bath. One minute she’d been there, the next she was gone. In the playground at school they used to scare each other: they’d say whoever had got the woman would go after kids next. It was only when Flea grew up and entered the police that she learnt the truth. The woman hadn’t been killed by a bogeyman but by the one-night-stand she’d left the club with. He’d reversed his car at her. Probably never meant to kill her, but did. He’d dumped her on a pig farm and Flea had spent three weeks one stifling summer pulling animal bones out of a pit there, steam-cleaning them, then passing them to an anthropologist. They never found the body and, without it, the CPS couldn’t bring the case. Even though everyone knew the truth.

  It showed what you could get away with if a body was well enough hidden. The most sensible thing Flea could do right now was to hire a chainsaw and cut Misty into a thousand pieces. Scatter them in rivers and fields. But even this new, cold imperative of hers couldn’t look that solution in the eye. So she’d come to another frantic but rational conclusion – the only one she could think of.

  She dragged her dive kit from the back seat, dumped it a few feet away and set about covering the car with sticks and branches. Then she pulled off her shoes, got into the drysuit, hauled on the buoyancy jacket and the cylinders, and gave the regulator three short breaths – one, two, three. She secured all the harness straps, deadlocked the car doors – checked again that it couldn’t be seen from the slip road – and carried her fins down to the edge of the quarry. She pulled them on, then the mask, and climbed down the rusting ladder that led into the quarry. At 1.13 a.m. exactly she slipped silently out of sight, into the dark waters of quarry number eight.

  The Marley family had always dived. Mum and Dad had taught the children. They’d put them in junior Solar suits aged eleven. Most family holidays revolved around scuba- and wreck-diving: the Red Sea, Cyprus, once into Truk Lagoon half bankrupting themselves. It was how they had come together, the place they found comfort, the place they settled into something easier. Even the accident hadn’t changed that. But diving here now, alone and in the dark? It broke all the rules of danger and common sense. It was a dumb, stark invitation to death.

  She sank slowly, letting out small amounts of air from the suit as she descended to fifteen metres. The divelight she held pointed downwards, its membranous beam picking out swirling particles in the pitch darkness below. The light pierced a long way down, maybe another fifteen metres, but it didn’t reach the bottom. She was in the deepest part of the quarry. There was still twenty-five metres – almost seventy-five feet – of unlit water beneath her.

  Down another fifteen metres. She found the net from memory, its weed-coloured webbing faint and furred in the torchbeam. She handheld herself along it twenty feet until she could see the warning sign. The hole she’d made last week was still there, the frayed edges moving slowly like wafting sea anemones. She ducked through, twisting over as she did to stop the cylinders snagging – she didn’t want a repeat of last time. A few feet inside the net, at the place where the accident had happened, she stopped, turned around and around in the water, pointing the torchbeam into the swirling darkness.

  Usually, when she did decompression stops, she’d clip herself to a rope with a carabiner and rest on her front, horizontal in the water. Tonight she wanted to stay vertical. Wanted to be able to turn, to see 360 degrees. Upping the buoyancy in her jacket, releasing a little air from her drysuit so it didn’t shoot up and gather round the neck seal, she found her neutral buoyancy, then let her arms drift out sideways. The divelight shone off to the side and she bobbed peacefully. Like a spaceman in the blackness.

  She rested to start with. Eyes closed. Concentrated on emptying her head so there was nothing, no thought, no sound, just the in-out-in-out of her breathing. She’d heard once, years ago, that some seabirds have an internal compass that they use to navigate across oceans, around half the world, and always come back to the same breeding ground. The birds don’t have to think about it, they give themselves up to something ancient and miraculous – the fact that their bodies know what their heads can’t: which is north and which is south.

  She tried to imagine herself as a seabird. Put her head back. Turned her face to the surface. She wanted to be told a direction. She wanted to be like a seabird and be told which way to go.

  The minutes passed. Between each noisy breath her pressurized ears played tricks on her. From everywhere she was being pulled by imaginary sounds, her attention drawn first right, then left. She let them wash over her, waiting to feel where her body wanted to lean, what it wanted to do.

  ‘You’ve got to look after yourself . . .’

  Her eyes flew open. The torch beam came up in front of her, seesawing against the black. She gripped it. Steadied it. Turned it from side to side, hunting out the sound.

  ‘Mum?’

  No answer.

  ‘Mum?’

  She sculled with her free hand, turning herself in the water. The beam of light yawed around her. It was a hallucination.

  ‘Mum? Are you there?’

  A movement. To her left. Just outside the beam of her torch. She swung the light across. About twenty yards away she saw feet. Human feet. Swimming away from her, fast.

  Amos Chipeta.

  She pushed her arms out into the darkness, the Salvo divelight clenched in both hands. The beam danced crazily across nothing. The feet had gone. All the light picked up was emptiness.

  Heart huge in her chest she tipped the top half of her body down and began to swim towards where the feet had been. Her instinct was to switch off the light, not wanting to give herself away to whatever was disappearing ahead of her into the darkness, but without it she was blind. Shielding it with her hand, letting a pinkish half-light filter through her fingers, she moved carefully through the wa
ter.

  According to the compass whatever it was had been travelling west and slightly upwards. She reached the underwater rockface of the quarry edge, shone the torch along it and saw nothing. The other way. Nothing. She checked the depth gauge. She was still a hundred feet below the surface. Turning the light above her head, she moved it in an arc. Even going fast Chipeta should still be within the beam. When she shone it down and swung it from side to side, covering every angle, there was still nothing to see. Just the plant life on the side of the rock. Moving lazily.

  Something occurred to her. It was rumoured that the quarry connected with local caves left behind by the Roman lead miners. That there were tunnels here. Wedging the torch in her buoyancy jacket she moved her hands along the slimed surface.

  It jumped at her, almost as soon as she’d started looking. A cavity. A place darker than the rest of the rock. It wasn’t on the quarry schematic – she was almost sure of that. She pushed her hand into it and shone the light around the edges, then into its depths to get the measure of it. There was no end to it. The beam shone into blackness. The diameter of the hole was big too: you could fit three men through here, even if they were wearing full diving gear.

  Even in diving gear. She screwed up her face. No excuses, then.

  One kick propelled her up and into the opening. She kept her hands on the walls, walked her fingers along, knowing how easy it would be to come into a narrowing so fast that the ceiling ripped the cylinders off her back. People had died like that, in places like the Eagle’s Nest sinkhole, or the Yucatan cave systems, not like her parents, in a fatal freefall to the bottom, but tangled in guide lines, lodged between unforgiving rocks, trapped in water-filled sumps and crawl spaces. She thought of them struggling on and on in the lonely darkness. Until the air gauge hit critical. Until the pony cylinder was dead and lungs sucked at a vacuum. Clangtanking, they called it. The worst way to die.